In the last 80 days, we've completed all the work we could related to building out facilities on the summit. We managed to haul enough lightstone, heat fluorite, and copper to finish everything except the actual stirling engine for power production. The thermal battery is ready for them to be installed as soon as the inside path is completed. We've also built some of the beginnings of the radio station. A major component of which is putting long grounding wires down in a circular fan around where the central tower will go.

The amount of power being radiated into the air and even the ground itself means that we need sufficient grounding in order to not waste electrical energy as heat in the ground. The area under the eventual tower has also been replaced with lightstone to reduce the conductivity directly from the tower itself to the ground. We don't want the tower grounded, but instead, the circuit ground needs to be adequately grounded, which is a different part from the antenna itself.

They should be breaking through to the summit any day now on the internal path through the mountain, and we should be getting news soon that the trade city will be ready for it's large mana crystal. We've started filling orders for magic ovens and rock hammers, alongside mana powered jaw crushers that some of the dwarves on the mainland have taken a liking to.

Though not everyone is ordering from us. A handful of the dwarves have chosen to buy from the human manufacturer. While we weren't looking, they cornered their own continent's market for the product. In all likelihood, they have been making and selling them internally since before they offered them to the dwarves. In the competing market of the dwarven continent, we'll get to see who makes a better product. While I'm confident our quality is probably better, I do worry about a few things that may actually be to the human's advantage.

First, our parts are made in a factory, following the ford idea of replaceable parts. While that is useful if you have a supply chain and logistics, it also means that parts have a lower tolerance for replacement parts. This leads to better overall product quality, but also makes doing repairs harder. Some parts are going to have to come from a factory in order to be replaced. From what I can tell, the human versions are all made by hand. That means that a remote blacksmith could likely repair almost any mechanical component that fails.

Since the dwarven continent is a somewhat narrow continent, we can reach a lot of the continent quickly via ports and our ships. That means we ostensibly have a logistical network for delivering replacement parts. If you have the part, the repair of our systems also requires less knowledge, meaning you don't even need to keep a blacksmith around for repairs, which can be an advantage as well. This is all the more reason that I hope that we can get trains and rails adopted across the dwarven and human continents quickly. The better the logistical network, the more of an advantage our replaceable parts have over hand manufacturing.

The internal pathway up the mountain broke through after another 22 days. We're cutting things pretty close, because the earliest snow I've seen on the summit has occurred before this time in the past. We're 34 days from the official start of winter. With the easier path up though, working on things on the summit will be easier, and we'll be able to work with fewer breaks. The spiral path to the top of the mountain has cart tracks as well, so we can haul heavier items up, which is exactly what we needed.

This will also open up other developments on the summit, should we want to build more things up there. I've considered building out a larger mirror telescope for some time, and that would be the perfect place for it. Before we do that though, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to develop the summit's infrastructure. In order for everything to be usable year round, we have to snow proof things. There is sometimes an excess of ten feet of snow on the summit, which would make things difficult normally. Since a lot of the snow falls in a short period of time, it's not like we can just rely on workers to handle it without shutdowns.

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Some of the snow removal and prevention has to be automatic. Buildings are going to have small heat fluorite crystals installed in their roofs with copper wires spread into a grid to heat them. They don't need a lot of heat, just enough to keep melting the snow. I want to have a building built over the tunnel entrance to prevent snow from building up there as well. Ideally, it will have a storage building attached or nearby to facilitate future development, since it allows unskilled labor to haul materials to a designated location easily without having to enter into a worksite or having to keep to a strict schedule. If possible, I also want a covered path between buildings with a similar idea of using heat fluorite to keep the paths clear year round.

In order to do all this before the snow starts building up, I'm going to need more than just one construction team's assistance. I've asked Zeb, but that might end up being an issue since we're going to be transporting a large mana crystal to the mainland soon. I had initially understood the situation as, when the mana crystal is installed, we'll have more available labor afterwards back on the home island. What I failed to grasp was what timescale he meant.

I assumed he meant right away. What he meant was after a month or two. During that month or two, we'll have a little bit less labor, since he wants to send along two more construction teams to install the crystal. With the increased mana available there, he then plans on having all the teams work hard building out a ton of infrastructure over the course of a month or so. From the city walls to housing and basic warehouses, he wants to basically get the city functional as soon as possible. After that, he'll bring back the extra teams he sent, plus a few more.

That opens up the capability to send other demons to start working in the trade city properly, generating income and building out non-construction business. He plans on having an imp summoning area built not long after. The assumption is that a demon there will likely develop the ability at some point. If after a few months none do, then we'll send one of our demons who can summon imps there to work. It is a joint city though, so after our housing and some manufacturing is built, we'll reach out to Kao about opening up housing for dwarves to move in.

It started snowing just 4 days later on the summit. We barely had gotten the heating for the existing roof over the thermal battery installed by that time. Two days after that, preparations were complete to haul the next large mana crystal to the mainland, and I was stuck with only one construction team again. While that didn't mean we couldn't work, it did mean I needed a lot of additional labor in order to continue construction on the summit. With frequent snowstorms, it also meant there wasn't much time to actually work anywhere that was uncovered, which slowed things down considerably.

The first order of business was attempting to build the building over the exit of the tunnel. What should have taken about four days ended up taking fourteen. Building a covered path between the two locations, spanning a few hundred feet, also ended up taking twenty days thanks to delays due to snow. The good news was that the heating system did a good job of preventing snow buildup on buildings, and had the added effect of making the buildings pleasant to be in. The way we've installed the heating crystals for the building roofs, they're able to be removed relatively easily, so during the warmer months they can be removed to prevent things from becoming too uncomfortable.

We're going to have to wait until the snow melts before we can actually install the radio tower itself, since we'll be hoisting up a massive antenna using cables, which will take quite a bit of time, and a large amount of clear space. We can, however, probably get the rest of the buildings set up before then, meaning all we'll have left is to set up the antenna. I plan on installing some test radio receivers around the island to test the system when it is up and running. By then, we should also be able to check if small radio receivers will work on the second island. If so, we'll at least have one directional communication possible for emergencies.

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